The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Technological advances in data processing have a profound impact on the way business associations conduct business. While in the past, the documents were usually docketed and processed manually, currently, the docketing and processing of the documents may be at least partially automated. For example, the invoices may be received via e-mail, the received invoices may be scanned using a scanner, and digital data generated by the scanner may be automatically transmitted from the scanner to a company processing center.
However, because the data may be received from a variety of data sources and may be represented in a variety of data formats, the received data usually needs to be processed by a specialized software application. In fact, some received data may require processing by two or more specialized applications, each of which may be selected based on many factors. For example, the specialized applications may be selected based on a data format in which the data is represented or based on a file extension of the file in which the data is saved.
Moreover, selecting the applications that are configured to process received data may depend on a source from which the data was received and a purpose for which the data was sent. For example, the data received from vendors and suppliers may be processed by invoice-processing applications, while the data sent for archiving purposes may be processed by an archiving application.
Selecting the applications to process the received data becomes even more complicated as new sources for providing data and new media for processing the data are developed and implemented. Hence, determining how to manage and process the data received from various sources is becoming more and more challenging.